Tuesday, June 3, 2008

ON SOME ADDED HORRIFYING NEW DANGERS OF PSYCHIATRY IN THE SERVICE OF THE RULERS
by Justice Lover

As if the past and present practices of coercive psychiatry are not inhuman enough there are now new terrorist (and secretive, of course) methods of control, torture and murder by new technologies which have been developed by scientists at the service and on the order of the rulers. Those secret technologies would make psychiatry infinitely more dangerous to humanity !

The following article highlights some of those horrific dangers.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7123

On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology

by Carole Smith

Global Research, October 18, 2007
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 2003.

"We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use." [Excerpt]


For those of us who were trained in a psychoanalytical approach to the patient which was characterised as patient centred, and which acknowledged that the effort to understand the world of the other person entailed an awareness that the treatment was essentially one of mutuality and trust, the American Psychiatry Association's Diagnostic Criteria for Schizotypal personality was always a cause for alarm.

The Third Edition (1987) of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) required that there be at least four of the characteristics set out for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and an approved selection of four could be: magical thinking, telepathy or sixth sense; limited social contact; odd speech; and over-sensitivity to criticism. By 1994, the required number of qualifying characteristics were reduced to two or more, including, say, hallucinations and 'negative ' symptoms such as affective flattening, or disorganised or incoherent speech – or only one if the delusions were bizarre or the hallucination consisted of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behaviour or thoughts. The next edition of the DSM is not due until the year 2010.

In place of a process of a labelling which brought alienation and often detention, sectioning, and mind altering anti-psychotic medication, many psychoanalysts and psychotherapists felt that even in severe cases of schizoid withdrawal we were not necessarily wasting our time in attempting to restore health by the difficult work of unravelling experiences in order to make sense of an illness. In this way, psychoanalysis has been, in its most radical form, a critic of a society, which failed to exercise imaginative empathy when passing judgement on people.

The work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles or R.D. Laing - all trained as psychiatrists and all of them rebels against the standard procedures – provided a way of working with people very different from the psychiatric model, which seemed to encourage a society to repress its sickness by making a clearly split off group the carriers of it. A psychiatrist in a mental hospital once joked to me, with some truth, when I commented on the number of carrier bags carried by many of the medicated patients around the hospital grounds, that they assessed the progress of the patient in terms of the reduction of the number of carrier bags. It is too often difficult to believe, however, when hearing the history of a life, that the "schizophrenic" was not suffering the effects of having been made, consciously and unconsciously, the carefully concealed carrier of the ills of the family.

For someone who felt his mind was going to pieces, to be put into the stressful situation of the psychiatric examination, even when the psychiatrist acquitted himself with kindness, the situation of the assessment procedure itself, can be 'an effective way to drive someone crazy, or more crazy.' (Laing, 1985, p 17). But if the accounting of bizarre experiences more or less guaranteed you a new label or a trip to the psychiatric ward, there is even more reason for a new group of people to be outraged about how their symptoms are being diagnosed. A doubly cruel sentence is being imposed on people who are the victims of the most appalling abuse by scientific-military experiments, and a totally uncomprehending society is indifferent to their evidence. For the development of a new class of weaponry now has the capability of entering the brain and mind and body of another person by technological means.

Harnessing neuroscience to military capability, this technology is the result of decades of research and experimentation, most particularly in the Soviet Union and the United States. (Welsh, 1997, 2000) We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use. The patents deriving from Bernard J. Eastlund's work provide the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level, particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than accomplished by the prior art, the detonation of nuclear devices at various yields and various altitudes. (ref High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project, HAARP).

Some patents, now owned by Raytheon, describe how to make "nuclear sized explosions without radiation" and describe power beam systems, electromagnetic pulses and over-the-horizon detection systems. A more disturbing use is the system developed for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency radiation (RFR), and their use as a device for causing negative effects on human health and thinking. The victim, the innocent civilian target is locked on to, and unable to evade the menace by moving around. The beam is administered from space. The Haarp facility as military technology could be used to broadcast global mind-control, as a system for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency (RFR). The super-powerful radio waves are beamed to the ionosphere, heating those areas, thereby lifting them. The electromagnetic waves bounce back to the earth and penetrate human tissue.

Dr Igor Smirnov, of the Institute of Psycho-Correction in Moscow, says: "It is easily conceivable that some Russian 'Satan', or let's say Iranian – or any other 'Satan', as long as he owns the appropriate means and finances, can inject himself into every conceivable computer network, into every conceivable radio or television broadcast, with relative technological ease, even without disconnecting cables…and intercept the radio waves in the ether and modulate every conceivable suggestion into it. This is why such technology is rightfully feared."(German TV documentary, 1998).

If we were concerned before about diagnostic criteria being imposed according to the classification of recognizable symptoms, we have reason now to submit them to even harsher scrutiny. The development over the last decades since the Cold War arms race has included as a major strategic category, psycho-electronic weaponry, the ultimate aim of which is to enter the brain and mind. Unannounced, undebated and largely unacknowledged by scientists or by the governments who employ them – technology to enter and control minds from a distance has been unleashed upon us. The only witnesses who are speaking about this terrible technology with its appalling implications for the future, are the victims themselves and those who are given the task of diagnosing mental illness are attempting to silence them by classifying their evidence and accounts as the symptoms of schizophrenia, while the dispensers of psychic mutilation and programmed pain continue with their work, aided and unopposed.

If it was always crucial, under the threat of psychiatric sectioning, to carefully screen out any sign of confused speech, negativity, coldness, suspicion, bizarre thoughts, sixth sense, telepathy, premonitions, but above all the sense that "others can feel my feelings, and that someone seemed to be keeping up a running commentary on your thoughts and behaviour," then reporting these to a psychiatrist, or anyone else for that matter who was not of a mind to believe that such things as mind-control could exist, would be the end of your claim to sanity and probably your freedom. For one of the salient characteristics of mind-control is the running commentary, which replicates so exactly, and surely not without design, the symptoms of schizophrenia. Part of the effort is to remind the victim that they are constantly under control or surveillance. Programmes vary, but common forms of reminders are electronic prods and nudges, body noises, twinges and cramps to all parts of the body, increasing heart beats, applying pressures to internal organs – all with a personally codified system of comments on thoughts and events, designed to create stress, panic and desperation. This is mind control at its most benign. There is reason to fear the use of beamed energy to deliver lethal assaults on humans, including cardiac arrest, and bleeding in the brain.

It is the government system of secrecy, which has facilitated this appalling prospect. There have been warning voices. "…the government secrecy system as a whole is among the most poisonous legacies of the Cold War …the Cold War secrecy (which) also mandate(s) Active Deception…a security manual for special access programs authorizing contractors to employ 'cover stories to disguise their activities. The only condition is that cover stories must be believable." (Aftergood & Rosenberg, 1994; Bulletin of Atomic Scientist). Paranoia has been aided and abetted by government intelligence agencies.

In the United Kingdom the fortifications against any disturbing glimmer of awareness of such actual or potential outrages against human rights and social and political abuses seem to be cast in concrete. Complete with crenellations, ramparts and parapets, the stronghold of nescience reigns supreme. To borrow Her Majesty the Queen's recent observation: "There are forces at work of which we are not aware." One cannot say that there is no British Intelligence on the matter, as it is quite unfeasible that the existence of the technology is not classified information. Indeed it is a widely held belief that the women protesting against the presence of cruise missiles at Greenham Common were victims of electro-magnetic radiation at gigahertz frequency by directed energy weapons, and that their symptoms, including cancer, were consistent with such radiation effects as reported by Dr Robert Becker who has been a constantly warning voice against the perils of electro-magnetic radiation. The work of Allen Frey suggests that we should consider radiation effects as a grave hazard producing increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier, and weakening crucial defenses of the central nervous system against toxins. (Becker, 1985, p. 286).

Dr Becker has written about nuclear magnetic resonance as a familiar tool in medecine known as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. Calcium efflux is the result of cyclotronic resonance which latter can be explained thus: If a charged particle or ion is exposed to a steady magnetic field in space, it will begin to go into a circular or orbital, motion at right angles to the applied magnetic field.The speed with which it orbits will be determined by the ratio between the charge and the mass of the particle and by the strength of the magnetic field. (Becker, 1990,p.235) The implications of this for wide scale aggression by using a combination of radar based energy and the use of nuclear resonating are beyond the scope of the writer, but appear to be worth the very serious consideration of physicists in assessing how they might be used against human beings.

Amongst medical circles, however, it has so far not been possible for the writer to find a neuroscientist, neurologist or a psychiatrist, nor for that matter, a general medical practitioner, who acknowledges even the potential for technological manipulation of the nervous system as a problem requiring their professional interest. There has been exactly this response from some of England's most eminent practitioners of the legal profession, not surprisingly, because the information about such technology is not made available to them. They would refer anyone attempting to communicate mind- harassment as a psychiatric problem, ignoring the crime that is being committed.

The aim here is not to attempt a comprehensive history and development of the technology of mind control. These very considerable tasks - which have to be done under circumstances of the most extreme difficulty - have been addressed with clarity and courage by others, who live with constant harm and threats, not least of all contemptuous labelling. Their work can be readily accessed on the internet references given at the end of this paper. For a well-researched outline of the historical development of electro-magnetic technology the reader should refer to the timeline of dates and electromagnetic weapon development by Cheryl Welsh, president of Citizens against Human Rights Abuse. (Welsh 1997; 2001). There are at least one and a half thousand people worldwide who state they are being targeted. Mojmir Babacek, now domiciled in his native Czech Republic, after eight years of residence in the United States in the eighties, has made a painstakingly meticulous review of the technology, and continues his research. (Babacek 1998, 2002)

We are concerned here with reinforcing in the strongest possible terms:

i) The need for such abuses to human rights and the threats to democracy to be called to consciousness, and without further delay.

ii) To analyse the reasons why people might defend themselves from becoming conscious of the existence of such threats.

iii) To address the urgent need for intelligence, imagination, and information - not to mention compassion - in dealing with the victims of persecution from this technology, and

iv) To alert a sleeping society, to the imminent threats to their freedom from the threat from fascist and covert operations who have in all probability gained control of potentially lethal weaponry of the type we are describing.

It is necessary to emphasise that at present there is not even the means for victims to gain medical attention for the effects of radiation from this targeting. Denied the respect of credulity of being used as human guinea pigs, driven to suicide by the breakdown of their lives, they are treated as insane – at best regarded as 'sad cases'. Since the presence of a permanent 'other' in one's mind and body is by definition an act of the most intolerable cruelty, people who are forced to bear it but who refuse to be broken by it, have no other option than to turn themselves into activists, their lives consumed by the battle against such atrocities, their energies directed to alerting and informing the public of things they don't want to hear or understand about evil forces at work in their society.


It is necessary, at this point, to briefly outline a few – one might say the precious few – attempts by public servants to verify the existence and dangers inherent in this field:

  • In January 1998, an annual public meeting of the French National Bioethics Committee was held in Paris. Its chairman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neuroscientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, told the meeting that "advances in cerebral imaging make the scope for invasion of privacy immense. Although the equipment needed is still highly specialized, it will become commonplace and capable of being used at a distance. That will open the way for abuses such as invasion of personal liberty, control of behaviour and brainwashing. These are far from being science-fiction concerns…and constitute "a serious risk to society." ("Nature." Vol 391, 1998).
  • In January 1999, the European Parliament passed a resolution where it calls " for an international convention introducing a global ban on all development and deployment of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings. It is our conviction that this ban can not be implemented without the global pressure of the informed general public on the governments. Our major objective is to get across to the general public the real threat which these weapons represent for human rights and democracy and to apply pressure on the governments and parliaments around the world to enact legislature which would prohibit the use of these devices to both government and private organisations as well as individuals." (Plenary sessions/Europarliament, 1999)
  • In October 2001, Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich introduced a bill to the House of Representatives which, it was hoped would be extremely important in the fight to expose and stop psycho-electronic mind control experimentation on involuntary, non-consensual citizens. The Bill was referred to the Committee on Science, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services and International Relations. In the original bill a ban was sought on 'exotic weapons' including electronic, psychotronic or information weapons, chemtrails, particle beams, plasmas, electromagnetic radiation, extremely low frequency (ELF) or ultra low frequency (ULF) energy radiation, or mind control technologies. Despite the inclusion of a prohibition of the basing of weapons in space, and the use of weapons to destroy objects or damage objects in space, there is no mention in the revised bill of any of the aforementioned mind-invasive weaponry, nor of the use of satellite or radar or other energy based technology for deploying or developing technology designed for deployment against the minds of human beings. (Space Preservation Act, 2002)

In reviewing the development of the art of mind-invasive technology– there are a few outstanding achievements to note:

In 1969 Dr Jose Delgado, a Yale psychologist, published a book: "Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society". In essence, he displayed in practical demonstrations how, by means of electrical stimulation of the brain which had been mapped out in its relations between different points and activities, functions and sensations, - by means of electrical stimulation, how the rhythm of breathing and heartbeat could be changed, as well as the function of most of the viscera, and gall bladder secretion. Frowning, opening and closing of eyes and mouth, chewing, yawning, sleep, dizziness, epileptic seizures in healthy persons were induced. The intensity of feelings could be controlled by turning the knob, which controlled the intensity of the electric current. He states at the end of his book the hope that the new power will remain limited to scientists or some charitable elite for the benefit of a "psychocivilized society."

In the 1980's the neuromagnetometer was developed which functions as an antenna and could monitor the patterns emerging from the brain. (In the seventies the scientists had discovered that electromagnetic pulses enabled the brain to be stimulated through the skull and other tissues, so there was no more need to implant electrodes in the brain). The antenna, combined with the computer, could localize the points in the brain where the brain events occur. The whole product is called the magnetoencephalograph.

In January 2000 the Lockheed Martin neuroengineer Dr John D. Norseen, was quoted (US News and World Report, 2000) as hoping to turn the electrohypnomentalaphone, a mind reading machine, into science fact. Dr Norseen, a former Navy pilot, claims his interest in the brain stemmed from reading a Soviet book in the 1980's claiming that research on the mind would revolutionize the military and society at large. By a process of deciphering the brain's electrical activity, electromagnetic pulsations would trigger the release of the brain's own transmitters to fight off disease, enhance learning, or alter the mind's visual images, creating a 'synthetic reality'. By this process of BioFusion, (Lockheed Martin, 2000) information is placed in a database, and a composite model of the brain is created. By viewing a brain scan recorded by (functional) magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, scientists can tell what the person was doing at the time of recording – say reading or writing, or recognise emotions from love to hate. "If this research pans out", says Norseen, "you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it." But Norseen says he is 'agnostic' on the moral ramifications, that he's not a mad scientist – just a dedicated one. "The ethics don't concern me," he says, "but they should concern someone else."

The next big thing looks like being something which we might refer to as a neurocomputer but it need not resemble a laptop – it may be reducible to whatever size is convenient for use, such as a small mobile phone. Arising from a break-through and exploitation of PSI-phenomena, it may be modelled on the nervous-psychic activity of the brain – that is, as an unbalanced, unstable system of neurotransmitters and interacting neurones, the work having been derived from the creation of a copy of a living brain – accessed by chance, and ESP and worked on by design.

On receiving a communication from the writer on the feasibility of a machine being on the horizon which, based on the project of collecting electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain and transmitting them into another brain that would read a person's thoughts, or using the same procedure in order to impose somebody else's thoughts on another brain and in this way direct his actions – there was an unequivocal answer from IBM at executive level that there was no existing technology to create such a computer in the foreseeable future. This is at some variance with the locating of a patent numbered 03951134 on the Internet pages of IBM Intellectual Property Network for a device, described in the patent, as capable of picking up at a distance the brain waves of a person, process them by computer and emit correcting waves which will change the original brain waves. Similar letters addressed to each of the four top executives of Apple Inc., in four individual letters marked for their personal attention, produced absolutely no response. This included the ex- Vice President of the United States, Mr Al Gore, newly elected to the Board of Directors of Apple.

Enough people have been sufficiently concerned by the reports of victims of mind control abuse to organise The Geneva Forum, in 2002, held as a joint initiative of the Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva; the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; the International Committee of the Red cross, and the Human Rights Watch (USA), and Citizens against Human Rights Abuses (CAHRA); and the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, which was represented by the Professor and Senior Lecturer from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.

In England, on May 25, 1995, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. carried an article based on a report by Nic Lewer, the peace researcher from Bradford University, which listed "more than 30 different lines of research into 'new age weapons'…"some of the research sounds even less rational. There are, according to Lewer, plans for 'pulsed microwave beams' to destroy enemy electronics, and separate plans for very-low-frequency sound beams to induce vomiting, bowel spasm, epileptic seizures and also crumble masonry." Further, the article states, "There are plans for 'mind control' with the use of 'psycho-correction messages' transmitted by subliminal audio and visual stimuli. There is also a plan for 'psychotronic weapons' – apparently the projection of consciousness to other locations – and another to use holographic projection to disseminate propaganda and misinformation." (Welsh, Timeline). Apart from this notable exception it is difficult to locate any public statement of the problem in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, the problem of credulity does not necessarily cease with frequent mention, as in the United States, in spite of the number of reported cases, there is still not sufficient public will to make strenuous protest against what is not only already happening, but against what will develop if left unchecked. It appears that the administration believes that it is necessary and justifiable, in the interests of national security, to make experimental human sacrifices, to have regrettable casualties, for there to be collateral damage, to suffer losses in place of strife or war. This is, of course, totally incompatible with any claims to be a democratic nation which respects the values of human life and democracy, and such an administration which tutors its servants in the ways of such barbaric tortures must be completely condemned as uncivilised and hypocritical.

Disbelief as a Defence Mechanism

In the face of widespread disbelief about mind-control, it seems worth analysing the basis of the mechanisms employed to maintain disbelief:

i) In the sixties, Soviet dissidents received a significant measure of sympathy and indignant protest from western democracies on account of their treatment, most notedly the abuse of psychiatric methods of torture to which they were subjected. It is noteworthy that we seem to be able to access credulity, express feelings of indignant support when we can identify with victims, who share and support our own value system, and who, in this particular historical case, reinforced our own values, since they were protesting against a political system which also threatened us at that time. Psychologically, it is equally important to observe that support from a safe distance, and the benefits to the psyche of attacking a split-off 'bad father', the soviet authorities in this case, presents no threat to one's internal system; indeed it relieves internal pressures. On the other hand, recognizing and denouncing a similar offence makes very much greater psychic demands of us when it brings us into conflict with our own environment, our own security, our own reality. The defence against disillusion serves to suppress paranoia that our father figure, the president, the prime minister, our governments - might not be what they would like to be seen to be.

ii) The need to deposit destructive envy and bad feelings elsewhere, on account of the inability of the ego to acknowledge ownership of them - reinforces the usefulness of persons or groups, which will serve to contain those, disowned, projected feelings which arouse paranoid anxieties. The concepts of mind-invasion strike at the very heart of paranoid anxiety, causing considerable efforts to dislodge them from the psyche. The unconscious identification of madness with dirt or excrement is an important aspect of anal aggression, triggering projective identification as a defence.

iii) To lay oneself open to believing that a person is undergoing the experience of being invaded mentally and physically by an unseen manipulator requires very great efforts in the self to manage dread.

iv) The defence against the unknown finds expression in the split between theory and practice; between the scientist as innovator and the society who can make the moral decisions about his inventions; between fact and science fiction, the latter of which can present preposterous challenges to the imagination without undue threat, because it serves to reinforce a separation from the real.

v) Identification with the aggressor. Sadistic fantasies, unconscious and conscious, being transferred on to the aggressor and identified with, aid the repression of fear of passivity, or a dread of punishment. This mechanism acts to deny credulity to the victim who represents weakness. This is a common feature of satanic sects.

vi) The liberal humanist tradition which denies the worst destructive capacities of man in the effort to sustain the belief in the great continuity of cultural and scientific tradition; the fear, in one's own past development, of not being 'ongoing', can produce the psychic effect of reversal into the opposite to shield against aggressive feelings. This becomes then the exaggerated celebration of the 'new' as the affirmation of human genius which will ultimately be for the good of mankind, and which opposes warning voices about scientific advances as being pessimistic, unenlightened, unprogressive and Luddite. Strict adherence to this liberal position can act as overcompensation for a fear of envious spoiling of good possessions, i.e. cultural and intellectual goods.

vii) Denial by displacement is also employed to ignore the harmful aspects of technology. What may be harmful for the freedom and good of society can be masked and concealed by the distribution of new and entertaining novelties. The technology, which puts a camera down your gut for medical purposes, is also used to limit your freedom by surveillance. The purveyors of innovative technology come up with all sorts of new gadgets, which divert, entertain and feed the acquisitive needs of insatiable shoppers, and bolster the economy. The theme of "Everything's up to date in Kansas City" only takes on a downside when individual experience – exploding breast implants, say – takes the gilt off the gingerbread. Out of every innovation for evil (i.e. designed for harming and destroying) some 'good' (i.e. public diversion or entertainment) can be promoted for profit or crowd-pleasing.

viii) Nasa is sending a spacecraft to Mars, or so we are told. They plan to trundle across the Martian surface searching for signs of water and life. We do not hear dissenting voices about its feasibility.

Why is it that, when a person accounts that their mind is being disrupted and they are being persecuted by an unseen method of invasive technology, that we cannot bring ourselves to believe them? Could it be that the horror involved in the empathic identification required brings the shutters down? Conversely, the shared experience of the blasting of objects into space brings with it the possibilities of shared potency or the relief that resonates in the unconscious of a massive projection or evacuation – a shared experience which is blessed in the name of man's scientific genius.

ix) The desire 'not to be taken in', not to be taken for a fool, provides one of the most powerful and common defence mechanism against credulity.

Power, Paranoia and Unhealthy Governments

The ability to be the bearer and container of great power without succumbing to the pressures of latent narcissistic psychoses is an important matter too little considered. The effect of holding power and the expectation and the need to be seen as capable of sustaining it, if not exercising it, encourages omnipotence of thought. In the wake of this, a narcissistic overevaluation of the subject's own mental processes may set in. In the effort to hold himself together as the possessor, container and executor of power, he (or indeed, she) may also, undergo a process of splitting which allows him, along with others, to bear enthralled witness of himself in this illustrious role. This may mean that the seat of authority is vacated, at least at times. The splitting process between the experiencing ego and the perceiving ego allows the powerful leader to alternate his perception of himself inside and outside, sometimes beside, himself. With the reinforcement of himself from others as his own narcissistic object, reality testing is constrained. In this last respect, he has much in common with the other powerful figure of the age, the movie star. or by those, in Freud's words, who are "ruined by success."

In a world, which is facing increasing disillusion about the gulf between the public platforms on which governments are elected, and the contingencies and pragmatics of retaining defence strategies and economic investments, the role of military and intelligence departments, with their respective tools of domination and covert infiltration, is increasingly alarming. Unaccountable to the public, protected from exposure and prosecution by their immunity, licensed to lie as well as to kill, it is in the hands of these agents that very grave threats to human rights and freedom lies. Empowered to carry out aggression through classified weapon experimentation which is undetectable, these men and women are also open to corruption from lucrative offers of financial reward from powerful and sinister groups who can utilize their skills, privileged knowledge and expertise for frankly criminal and fascist purposes.

Our information about the psychological profiles of those who are employed to practice surveillance on others is limited, but it is not difficult to imagine the effects on the personality that would ensue with the persistent practice of such an occupation, so constantly exposed to the perversions. One gains little snatches of insight here and there. In his book on CIA mind control research (Marks, 1988), John Marks quotes a CIA colleague's joke (always revealing for personality characteristics): "If you could find the natural radio frequency of a person's sphincter, you could make him run out of the room real fast." (One wonders if the same amusement is derived from the ability to apply, say infra-sound above 130 decibels, which is said to cause stoppage of the heart, according to one victim/activist from his readings of a report for the Russian Parliament.)

Left to themselves, these servants of the state may well feel exempt from the process of moral self-scrutiny, but the work must be dehumanising for the predator as well as the prey. It is probably true that the need to control their agents in the field was an incentive to develop the methods in use today. It is also an effectively brutalising training for persecuting others. Meanwhile the object, the prey, in a bid for not only for survival but also in a desperate effort to warn his or her fellows about what is going on, attempts to turn himself into a quantum physicist, a political researcher, a legal sleuth, an activist, a neurologist, a psychologist, a physiologist – his own doctor, since he cannot know what effects this freakish treatment might have on his body, let alone his mind. There are always new methods to try out which might prove useful in the search to find ways of disabling and destroying opponents – air injected into brains and lungs, lasers to strike down or blind, particle beams, sonar waves, or whatever combination of energies to direct, or destabilise or control.

Science and Scepticism

Scientists can be bought, not just by governments, but also by sinister and secret societies. Universities can be funded by governments to develop technology for unacceptably inhumane uses. The same people who deliver the weapons - perhaps respected scientists and academics - may cite the acceptable side of scientific discoveries, which have been developed by experimenting on unacknowledged, unfortunate people. In a cleaned up form, they are then possibly celebrated as a break-through in the understanding of the natural laws of the universe. It is not implausible that having delivered the technical means for destruction, the innovator and thinker goes on, wearing a different hat, to receive his (or her) Nobel Prize. There are scientists who have refused to continue to do work when they were approached by CIA and Soviet representatives. These are the real heroes of science.

In the power struggle, much lies at stake in being the first to gain control of ultimate mind-reading and mind-controlling technology. Like the nuclear bomb, common ownership would seem by any sane calculations to cancel out the advantage of possession, but there is always a race to be the first to possess the latest ultimate means of mass destruction. The most desirable form is one that can be directed at others without contaminating oneself in the process - one that can be undetected and neatly, economically and strategically delivered. We should be foolish to rule out secret organisations, seeing threat only from undemocratic countries and known terrorist groups.

As consumers in a world which is increasingly one in which shopping is the main leisure activity, we should concern ourselves to becoming alert to the ways in which human welfare may have been sacrificed to produce an awesome new gadget. It may be the cause for celebration for the 'innovator', but brought about as the result of plugging in or dialling up the living neuronal processes of an enforced experimentee. If we are concerned not to eat boiled eggs laid by battery hens, we might not regard it morally irrelevant to scrutinise the large corporations producing electronically innovative 'software.' We might also be wary about the origins of the sort of bland enticements of dating agencies who propose finding your ideal partner by matching up brain frequencies and 'bio-rhythms'.

We do not know enough about the background of such technology, nor how to evaluate it ethically. We do not know about its effects on the future, because we are not properly informed. If governments persist in concealing the extent of their weapon capability in the interests of defence, they are also leaving their citizens disempowered of the right to protest against their deployment. More alarmingly, they are leaving their citizens exposed to their deployment by ruthless organisations whose concerns are exactly the opposite of democracy and human rights.

Back in the United Kingdom

Meanwhile, back in England, the Director of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor Colin Blakemore, also the elective Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council writes to the author that he "... knows of no technology (not even in the wildest speculations of neuroscientists) for scanning and collecting 'neuronal data' at a distance." (Blakemore, 2003, ) This certitude is at distinct variance with the fears of other scientists in Russia and the United States, and not least of all with the fears of the French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux of the French National Bioethics Committee already quoted (see page 5). It is also very much at odds with the writing of Dr Michael Persinger from the Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. His article "On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Algorithms" (1995), he describes the ways that individual differences among human brains can be overcome and comes to a conclusion about the technological possibilities of influencing a major part of the approximately six billion people on this planet without mediation through classical sensory modalities but by generating electromagnetic induction of fundamental algorithms in the atmosphere. Dr Persinger's work is referred to by Captain John Tyler whose work for the American Air Force and Aerospace programmes likens the human nervous system to a radio receiver. (1990)

Very recently the leading weekly cultural BBC radio review had as one of its guests, the eminent astro-physicist and astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has recently published a book, "Our Final Century", in which he makes a sober and reasoned case for the fifty-fifty chance that millions of people, probably in a 'third-world country' could be wiped out in the near future through biotechnology and bio-terrorism – "by error or malign release." He spoke of this devastation as possibly coming from small groups or cults, based in the United States. "…few individuals with the right technology to cause absolute mayhem." He also said that in this century, human nature is no longer a fixed commodity, that perhaps we should contemplate the possibility that humans would even have implants in the brain.

The other guests on this programme were both concerned with Shakespeare, one a theatre producer and the other a writer on Shakespeare, while his remaining guest was a young woman who had a website called "Spiked", the current theme of which was Panic Attack, that is to say, Attack on Panic. This guest vigorously opposed what she felt was the pessimism of Sir Martin, regarding his ideas as essentially eroding trust, and inducing panic. This reaction seems to typify one way of dealing with threat and anxiety, and demonstrates the difficulty that a warning voice, even from a man of the academic distinction of Martin Rees, has in alerting people to that which they do not want to hear. This flight reaction was reinforced by the presenter who summed up the morning's discussion at the end of the programme with the words: "We have a moral! Less panic, more Shakespeare!"

The New Barbarism

Since access to a mind-reading machine will enable the operator to access the ideas of another person, we should prepare ourselves for a new world order in which ideas will be, as it were, up for grabs. We need not doubt that the contents of another's mind will be scooped up, scooped out, sorted through as if the event was a jumble sale. The legal profession would therefore be well advised to consider the laws on Intellectual Property very judiciously in order to acquit themselves with any degree of authenticity. We should accustom ourselves to the prospect of recognizing our work coming out of the mouth of another. The prospect of wide-scale fraud, and someone posturing in your stolen clothes will not be a pretty sight. The term "personal mind enhancement" is slipping in through the back door, to borrow a term used by the Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and it is being done through technologically-induced mental co-ercion – mind raping and looting. In place of, or in addition to, cocaine, we may expect to see 'mind-enhanced' performances on "live" television.

The brave new science of neuropsychiatry and brain mapping hopes to find very soon, with the fMRI scanner - this "brand new toy that scientists have got their hands on" - "the blob for love" and "the blob for guilt", (BBC Radio 4: All in the Mind, 5 March, 2003). Soon we will be able to order a brain scan for anyone whose behaviour strikes us as odd or bizarre, and the vicissitudes of a life need no longer trouble us in our diagnostic assessments. In his recent Reith Lectures for the BBC (2003), Professor Ramachandran, the celebrated neuroscientist from the La Hoya Institute in San Diego, California, has demonstrated for us many fascinating things that the brain can do. He has talked to us about personality disorders and shown that some patients, who have suffered brain damage from head injury, do not have the capacity to recognise their mothers. Others feel that they are dead. And indeed he has found brain lesions in these people. In what seems to be an enormous but effortless leap, the self-styled "kid in a candy store" is now hoping to prove that all schizophrenics, have damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, which results in the inability to distinguish between fantasy (sic) and reality. Since Professor Ramachandran speaks of schizophrenia in the same breath as denial of illness, or agnosia, it is not clear, and it would be interesting to know, whether the person with the head injury has been aware or unaware of the head injury. Also does the patient derive comfort and a better chance at reality testing when he is told of the lesion? Does he feel better when he has received the diagnosis? And what should the psychoanalysts – and the psychiatrists, - feel about all those years of treating people of whose head injuries they were absolutely unaware? Was this gross negligence? Were we absolutely deluded in perceiving recovery in a sizeable number of them?

It is, however, lamentable that a neuroscientist with a professed interest in understanding schizophrenia should seek to provide light relief to his audience by making jokes about schizophrenics being people who are "convinced that the CIA has implanted devices in their brain to control their thoughts and actions, or that aliens are controlling them." (Reith Lecture, No 5, 2003).

There is a new desire for concretisation. The search for meaning has been replaced by the need for hard proof. If it doesn't light up or add up it doesn't have validity. The physician of the mind has become a surgeon. "He found a lump as big as a grapefruit!"

Facing up to the Dread and Fear of the Uncanny

Freud believed that an exploration of the uncanny would be a major direction of exploration of the mind in this century. The fear of the uncanny has been with us for a very long time. The evil eye, or the terrifying double, or intruder, is a familiar theme in literature, notably of Joseph Conrad in The Secret Sharer, and Maupassant's short story, Le Horla. Freud's analysis of the uncanny led him back to the old animistic conception of the universe: "…it seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to the animistic phase in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression." (Freud: 1919. p.362)

The separation of birth, and the childhood fear of 'spooks in the night', also leave their traces in each and every one of us. The individual experience of being alone in one's mind – the solitary fate of man which has never been questioned before, and upon which the whole history of civilised nurture is based - is now assaulted head-on. Since growing up is largely synonymous with acceptance of one's aloneness, the effort to assuage it is the basis for compassion and protection of others; it is the matrix for the greatest good, that of ordinary human kindness, and is at the heart of the communicating power of great art. Even if we must all live and die alone, we can at least share this knowledge in acts of tenderness which atone for our lonely state. In times of loss and mental breakdown, the starkness of this aloneness is all too clear. The best of social and group constructiveness is an effort to allay the psychotic anxieties that lie at the base of every one of us, and which may be provoked under extreme enough conditions.

The calculated and technological entry into another person's mind is an act of monumental barbarism which obliterates– perhaps with the twiddling of a dial – the history and civilisation of man's mental development. It is more than an abuse of human rights, it is the destruction of meaning. For any one who is forced into the hell of living with an unseen mental rapist, the effort to stay sane is beyond the scope of tolerable endurance. The imaginative capacity of the ordinary mind cannot encompass the horror of it. We have attempted to come to terms with the experiments of the Nazis in concentration camps. We now have the prospect of systematic control authorised by men who issue instructions through satellite communications for the destruction of societies while they are driving new Jaguars and Mercedes, and going to the opera.

This is essentially about humiliation, and disempowerment. It is a manifestation of rage acted out by those who fear impotence with such dread, that their whole effort is directed into the emasculation and destruction of the terrifying rival of their unconscious fantasies. In this apocalypse of the mind the punitive figure wells up as if out of the bowels of the opera stage, and this phantasmagoria is acted out on a global scale. These men may be mad enough to believe they are creating a 'psychocivilised world order". For anyone who has studied damaged children, it is more resonant of the re-enactment from the unconscious, reinforced by a life devoid of the capacity for empathic identification, of the obscenities of the abused and abusing child in the savage nursery. Other people -which were to them like Action Man toys to be dismembered, or Barbie Dolls to be obscenely defiled - become as meaningless in their humanity as pixillated dots on a screen.

Although forced entry into a mind is by definition obscene, an abbreviated assessment of the effects that mind-invaded people describe testifies to the perverted nature of the experiments. Bizarre noises are emitted from the body, a body known well enough by its owner to recognise the noises as extrinsic; air is pumped in and out of orifices as if by a bicycle pump. Gradually the repertoire is augmented - twinges and spasms to the eyes, nose, lips, strange tics, pains in the head, ringing in the ears, obstructions in the throat, pressure on the bowel and bladder causing incontinence; tingling in the fingers, feet, pressures on the heart, on breathing, dizziness, eye problems leading to cataracts; running eyes, running nose; speeding up of heart beats and the raising of pressure in the heart and chest; breathing and chest complaints leading to bronchitis and deterioration of the lungs; agonizing migraines; being woken up at night, sometimes with terrifying jolts ; insomnia; intolerable levels of stress from the loss of one's privacy. This collection of assorted symptoms is a challenge to any medical practitioner to diagnose.

There are, more seriously, if the afore-going is characterised as non-lethal, the potential lethal effects since the capability of ultrasound and infra-sound to cause cardiac arrest, and brain lesions, paralysis and blindness, as well as blinding by laser beam, or inducing asphyxia by altering the frequencies which control breathing in the brain, epileptic seizure – all these and others may be at the fingertips of those who are developing them. And those who do choose to use them may be sitting with the weapon, which resembles, say, a compact mobile telephone, on the restaurant table next to the bottle of wine, or beside them at the swimming pool.

Finally – if the victims at this point in the new history of this mind-control, cannot yet prove their abuse, it must be asserted that, faced with the available information about technological development – it is certainly not possible for those seeking to evade such claims – to disprove them. To wait until the effects become widespread will be too late.

  • For these and other reasons which this paper has attempted to address, we would call for an acknowledgement of such technology at a national and international level. Politicians, scientists and neurologists, neuroscientists, physicists and the legal profession should, without further delay, demand public debate on the existence and deployment of psychotronic technology; and for the declassification of information about such devices which abuse helpless people, and threaten democratic freedom.
  • Victims' accounts of abuse should be admitted to public account, and the use of psycho-electronic weapons should be made illegal and criminal,
  • The medical profession should be helped to recognise the symptoms of mind-control and psychotronic abuse, and intelligence about their deployment should be declassified so that this abuse can be seen to be what it is, and not interpreted automatically as an indication of mental illness.


If, in the present confusion and insecurity about the search for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, we conclude that failure to locate them - whatever the truth of the matter –encourages us to be generally complacent, then we shall be colluding with very dark forces at work if we conclude that a course of extreme vigilance signifies paranoia. For there may well be other weapons of mass destruction being developed and not so far from home; weapons which, being even more difficult to locate, are developed invisibly, unobstructed, unheeded in our midst, using human beings as test-beds. Like ESP, the methods being used on humans have not been detectable using conventional detection equipment. It is likely that the signals being used are part of a physics not known to scientists without the highest level of security clearance. To ignore the evidence of victims is to deny, perhaps with catastrophic results, the only evidence which might otherwise lead the defenders of freedom to becoming alert to the development of a fearful new methods of destruction. Manipulating terrorist groups and governments alike, these sinister and covert forces may well be very thankful for the professional derision of the victims, and for public ignorance.

References

Laing, R.D. (1985) : Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist. Macmillan, 1985

Welsh, Cheryl (1997): Timeline of Important Dates in the History of Electromagnetic Technology and Mind Control, at:
www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/timeline.htm

Welsh, Cheryl (2001):Electromagnetic Weapons: As powerful as the Atomic Bomb, President Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse, CAHRA Home Page: U.S. Human Rights Abuse Report: www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/emr13.htm

Begich, Dr N. and Manning, J.: 1995 Angels Don't Play this HAARP, Advances in Tesla Technology, Earthpulse Press.

ZDF TV: "Secret Russia: Moscow – The Zombies of the Red Czars", Script to be published in Resonance, No. 35

Aftergood, Steven and Rosenberg, Barbara: "The Soft Kill Fallacy", in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct 1994.

Becker, Dr Robert: 1985,The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, William Morrow, N.Y.

Babacek, Mojmir: International Movement for the Ban of Manipulation of The Human Nervous System: http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm and go to: Ban of Manipulation of Human Nervous System

"Is it Feasible to Manipulate the Human Brain at a Distance?"
www.aisjca-mft.org/braindist.htm

"Psychoelectronic Threat to Democracy"
http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm

Nature: "Advances in Neuroscience May Threaten Human Rights", Vol, 391, Jan. 22, 1998, p. 316; (ref Jean- Pierre Changeux)

Space Preservation Act: Bill H.R.2977 and HR 3616 IH in 107th Congress – 2nd Session: see: www.raven1.net/govptron.htm

Sessions European Parliament:
www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm?redirected=1

Click at Plenary Sessions, scroll down to Reports by A4 number, click, choose 1999 and fill in oo5 to A4

Delgado, Jose M.R: 1969. "Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society", Vol. 41, World Perspectives, Harper Row, N.Y.

US News & World Report: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics/ Dr John Norseen; Report January 3/10 2000, P.67

Freud, Sigmund: 1919: Art and Literature:" The Uncanny". Penguin,
Also "Those Wrecked by Success."

Marks, John: 1988 :The CIA and Mind Control – the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, ISBN 0-440-20137-3

Persinger, M.A. "On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorythms"; In Perception and Motor Skills, June, 1995, vol. 80, p. 791 – 799

Tyler, J."Electromagnetic Spectrum in Low Intensity Conflict," in "Low Intensity Conflict and Modern Technology", ed. Lt. Col. J. Dean, USAF, Air University Press, Centre For Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, Maxwell Air Force base, Alabama, June, 1986.

Rees, Martin Our Final Century: 2003, Heinemann.

Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Sharer, 1910. Signet Classic.

Maupassant, Guy de: Le Horla, 1886. Livre de Poche.

Carole Smith is a British psychoanalyst. In recent years she has been openly critical of government use of intrusive technology on non-consenting citizens for the development of methods of state control. Carole Smith
E-mail:
rockpool@dircon.co.uk

(Emphasis by Justice lover)

Sunday, June 1, 2008



EXPOSING MORE PSYCHIATRIC CRAP AND
THE LIES ON WHICH COERCIVE PSYCHIATRY IS FOUNDED

by Justice Lover
The following article was first published
by Asylum, "the magazine for democratic psychiatry". It is necessary, of course, to abolish the schizophrenia label, but not enough. Psychiatry must be absolutely and immediately outlawed before it inflicts more numerous deaths and suffering on innocent people. Psychiatry, with its alliance with Big Pharma, and with its barbaric history, cannot and never will be democratic.
It must be outlawed now as a dangerous terrorist and fascist quackery !

The Campaign for Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label


Paul Hammersley and Terence McLaughlin
(This and the previous post are excerpts from the 2 June, 2008, issue of Peter Myers' newsletter, peter.myers@mailstar.net)

The idea that schizophrenia can be viewed as a specific, genetically determined, biologically driven, brain disease has been based on bad science and social control since its inception. If the scientific argument against `schizophrenia' is judged to be won, it remains to take the evidence to the people, to explain and develop the alternatives in the full light of day. This is why the campaign is led by Asylum, the magazine for democratic psychiatry, psychology, education and community development. We believe the time is fully ripe for a paradigm shift across the field of mental distress and that the alternative knowledges and resources are now in place to mobilise for change. No more will we view the scandal where intelligent persons are expected to accept discredited diagnoses for fear of being labelled as `lacking in insight' and having treatment forced on them.

Read (2004) lists a fundamental dissatisfaction with the concept of schizophrenia as an illness that can be traced back over 80 years. More recently Bentall (1990, 2003), and Boyle (1990) have published elegant, well researched arguments clearly demonstrating that the concept of schizophrenia is neither valid nor reliable. Despite this, mainstream psychiatry continues to perpetuate the myth that when talking about ‘schizophrenia' we are discussing something that actually exists. For example, the opening statement of the NIMH public information website in the USA reads as follows:

“Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe disabling brain disease”

As Read (2004) points out, such an opinion is common in psychiatric textbooks and drug company pamphlets.

The CASL campaign is driven by two central factors:

1) The concept of schizophrenia is unscientific and has outlived any usefulness it may once have claimed.

2) The label schizophrenia is extremely damaging to those to whom it is applied.

Reliability

For a diagnosis to have any clinical utility it must be reliable. That is to say there must be consistency in how individuals are diagnosed. There is no evidence that this has ever been the case with schizophrenia. Read (2004), has illustrated how it is possible for 15 individuals with nothing in common to be gathered together in one room and ALL be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Test- retest analysis is as low as 37% and in 1970 when 194 British and 134 American psychiatrists were asked to provide a diagnosis on the basis of a case description, 69% of the Americans diagnosed schizophrenia whilst only 2% of the British did so. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that the reliability of the diagnosis has improved since that date.

Validity

An unreliable diagnosis cannot by definition be valid. However it is worth pointing out quite how poorly the diagnosis of schizophrenia performs in terms of validity. Firstly, a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us nothing about cause. Biological research into cause offers little more than a series of dead ends (Bentall 2003, Read 2004), and the significance of genetic inheritance in schizophrenia has been vastly overstated and is seriously methodologically flawed (Joseph 2004). Secondly, a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us nothing about prevalence rates. It is often blandly asserted that schizophrenia has a prevalence rate of 1% in all societies. This is not true; there is a wide disparity of prevalence between rural and urban environments and different research has shown prevalence rates of between 0.33 and 15%. In addition a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us little about the course of the illness. Kraepelin initially suggested that schizophrenia was a chronic deteriorating condition in all cases. We now know that all outcomes are possible from chronicity to complete recovery. Interestingly Marius Romme, the Dutch Psychiatrist, has argued that those most likely to make a complete recovery are individuals who reject or drop out of the psychiatric system.

Stigma

To be labelled ‘a schizophrenic' is one of the most devastating things that can happen to anyone. This label implies dangerousness, unpredictability, chronic illness, inability to work or function at any level and a lifelong need for medication that will often be ineffective (Whitaker 2005), but will usually cause unpleasant side effects. To champion the idea that schizophrenia is an illness just like any other (sometimes referred to as mental health literacy) makes the situation worse, in that it has been shown to increase amongst other things mistrust and a desire for social distance.

Sincere attempts have been made to rescue the word for humanity (Jenner et al., 1993) yet we have had to conclude that the continuation of the concept serves only the greed of Big Pharma in the pursuit of producing yet more `magic bullets' The desire of our campaign to place the label ‘schizophrenia' into the diagnostic dustbin, in which it most certainly belongs, is not based solely on the poor science that surrounds it but also on the immense damage that this label can bring about. A single word can ruin a life as surely as any bullet and schizophrenia is just such a word.

Japan abolishes schizophrenia?

There is hope. In 2002 in order to remove the stigma and prejudice associated with the term schizophrenia, The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology renamed the condition. Their reasons were that the old term ‘Seishin Buntreyso Byo' (mind- split disease) was ambiguous, had purely negative connotations and was in part related to the inhumane treatment of most people who carried the diagnosis (Sato 2006). The new term is ‘Togo Shitcho Sho' (Integration disorder). It is defined not as a specific illness, but as a syndrome based on a stress vulnerability model, with many different causes, symptoms and outcomes. This change was brought about largely by lobbying from service users and family groups, and has been welcomed by service users and families alike.

Alternatives

Alternatives already exist. Given the high levels of trauma in the lives of individuals who experience psychosis (Read et al 2004, Hammersley et al 2003) Professor Marius Romme in The Netherlands has for a number of years called for a new diagnostic category of post-traumatic psychosis. Colin Ross in the United States has made a similar call for a category of Dissociative Psychosis.

Yet alternatives also exist outside the language of psychopathology (Parker et al, 1995; Romme and Escher, 2000). In recognising the role of language and being prepared to make a practical deconstruction of what it produces (in this case forms of pathology) is taking one step in enabling communities, through self help networks, to regain control and ownership of human experience. Romme and Escher have remained particularly faithful to the contribution of knowledge of `experts by experience' and we remain firmly convinced that the future health of communities lies largely in the hands of organisations like the Hearing Voices Network and new initiatives like the Paranoia Network and depressiondialogues. The hope and promise of radical change is not something to be relegated wistfully to a bygone age but is firmly on the agenda today (McLaughlin, 2003). Furthermore growing alongside CASTL is a widespread enthusiasm to form a European Association for Democratic Psychiatry as the mechanism to bring about decisive change in public policy, media activity and social attitudes.

The CASL campaign began as collaboration between The COPE Initiative at the University of Manchester , the Hearing Voices Network and supporters of Asylum magazine (Asylum Associates). We are working to build a broad coalition of service users groups and like minded professionals, with the aim of bringing a more coherent and humane diagnostic system to service users worldwide. Yet it is more than that. We are looking to a future when we can talk less of the associations for democratic psychiatry and more of the International Association for Democratic Communities.

References :

Bentall, R.P. (1990). Reconstructing schizophrenia. London : Routledge.
Bentall, R.P. (2003). Madness Explained. Allen Lane . Penguin Books.
Boyle, M. Schizophrenia: A Scientific delusion. London : Routledge. UK .
Jenner, F.A., Monteiro, A. C. D., Zagallo-Cardoso, J. A. and Cunha-Oliveira, J. A. (1993) Schizophrenia: A Disease or Some Ways of Being Human. Sheffield : Sheffield UP.
Joseph, J. The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology under the Microscope. Ross-on-Wye. PCCS Books.
Hammersley, P.A., Dias, A., Todd, G., Bowen Jones, K., Reiley, B Bentall, R.P. (2002). Childhood trauma and hallucinations in bipolar affective disorder: A preliminary investigation. British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, 543-547.
McLaughlin, T. (2003) `The view from democratic psychiatry.' European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health 6(1) 63-66.
Parker, I, Georgaca, E, Harper, D, McLaughlin, T and Stowell Smith, M (1995) Deconstructing Psychopathology London : Sage .
Read, J, Mosher, L.R. & Bentall, R.P. (2004). Models of Madness. ISPS Publications.
Romme, M. and Escher, S. (2000) Making Sense of Voices: a guide for mental health professionals working with voice-hearers. London : Mind
Sato, M. (2006). Renaming schizophrenia: A Japanese Perspective. World Psychiatry, Feb, 5, 1, 53-55.
Whitacker, R. (2004). The case against anti-psychotic drugs: a 50-year history of doing more harm than good. Medical Hypotheses, 62, 5-13

FIRST COMMENTS

Marius Romme Emeritus Professor of Social Psychiatry:

"We have known for quite some time that the concept of schizophrenia has no scientific validity. We now however have an alternative which is more helpful. It is time to challenge the old concept and leave it behind.

The old concept is harmful because, it is impossible to solve the problems of the patient diagnosed with this illness. We now not only know that the symptoms exist and the illness does not, but we now know more about where the symptoms come from. It is a false suggestion that the symptoms are the result of an underlying illness. The symptoms are partly a reaction to serious problems in the life of the person and partly a reaction towards other symptoms. Therefore attention should be given to the reality for the patient of his /her complaints and the background for each of them should be explored. Only then do we discover what the problems for the patient are, and only then we might be able to help solve those problems. When for example hearing voices is the complaint related to a serious problem in the person's life and the explanation of the person is that it is the voice of God, this can be a reaction on hearing that voice as an explanation. This in itself is not a symptom but a reaction to the strange overwhelming voice often with the metaphoric meaning of a needed spiritual power or a father figure, wanted or feared".

Jacqui Dillon National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network

'In our experience, gained through more than 15 years running a national network, listening to people who hear voices, many of them living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia; it is clear that there is a definite link between traumatic life events and psychosis. On a daily basis, we hear terrible stories of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, and the impact of racism, poverty, neglect and stigma on peoples' lives. We do not seek to reduce people to a set of symptoms that we wish to suppress and control with medication. We show respect for the reality of the trauma they have endured and bear witness to the suffering they have experienced. We honour peoples' resilience and capacity to survive, often against the odds. The reduction of peoples distressing life experiences into a diagnosis of schizophrenia means that they are condemned to lives dulled by drugs and blighted by stigma and offered no opportunity to make sense of their experiences. Their routes to recovery are hindered. Rather than pathologising individuals, we have a collective responsibility to people who have experienced abuse, to acknowledge the reality and impact of those experiences and to support them to get the help they need. Abuse thrives in secrecy. We must expose the truth and not perpetuate injustice further; otherwise today's child abuse victims become tomorrow's psychiatric patients."

Campaign for the Abolition of Schizophrenia Label

By Dr. Terry Lynch, GP and psychotherapist, Limerick , Ireland .

Lynch, Terry (2004) Beyond Prozac: Healing Mental Distress, Ross-on-Wye, PCCS Books.

In our modern 21 st century, access to information has never been easier at any time in the history of the world. Yet, some aspects of life remain very poorly understood. One glaring example of this is the degree to which the general public understand – or more accurately, misunderstand – so-called ‘mental illness', and ‘schizophrenia' in particular.

The term ‘schizophrenia' needs to be abolished for a number of reasons. The so-called ‘illness' which the term is purported to represent is a gross misinterpretation of the experience of people so labelled. The schizophrenia label encourages the ongoing ignoring of key issues which are virtually always present in the life experience of people who receive this label. For example, issues such as great trauma in their lives; terror; immense loss of autonomy and of their sense of Self; overwhelm; powerlessness; immense emotional pain; intense isolation.

The term ‘schizophrenia' is taken to mean that a person who experiences certain experiences (such as hearing voices, becoming paranoid, experiencing ‘delusions', withdrawing to a major degree) is fundamentally abnormal; crazy; clearly and obviously suffering from a major illness, which we have come to call ‘schizophrenia'.

This interpretation is incorrect. Many mental health care workers who take the time to listen intently and work collaboratively with people who go through these experiences come to realise that, far from being abnormal or crazy, these experiences make sense in the context of the person's sense of Self, their experiences, and their life. By rejecting and dismissing the experiences, we also reject and dismiss the individual who is experiencing these.

The term ‘schizophrenia' has been taken a step further into inaccuracy and misinterpretation. The term is now widely seen as synonymous with the presence of a biological abnormality within the person's brain. This view has been enthusiastically promoted within some quarters, despite the reality that no consistent, reliable, or durable biological abnormalities have been identified, and in spite of the reality that the ‘diagnosis' is always, always made without reference to any tests, because there are no biological tests for this ‘condition'. This gross misrepresentation (ie that ‘schizophrenia' is known to be a biological illness) is used to justify the long-term (often life-long) use of mood-altering substances (often inaccurately referred to as antipsychotics) as the primary ‘treatment' of this ‘illness'.

The upshot of this worped logic and bad science is that recovery rates from ‘schizophrenia' in modern westernised societies trails well behind that in underdeveloped countries, according to World Health Organisation studies. The misguided obsession with imagined biological abnormalities over several decades has had the effect of reducing the attention on and research into psychological, social, human approaches to helping people get their lives back on track. There are many, many people – some of whom spoke at the Hearing Voices Network Annual Conference 2006) – whose recovery (from the traumatic experiences which caused their experiences of hearing voices, paranoia, etc) was impaired, and/or blocked by the preoccupation with the diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia' and its supposed ‘treatment' rather than working collaboratively with the person to explore the distress, seek to ascertain what may lie behind the distress, and with compassion, gentleness and caring, help the person to resolve their pain and move on with their life.

So-called ‘mental illness', including ‘schizophrenia', is one of the last remaining unrecognised apartheids left in our society. Well intentioned intervention is not necessarily effective intervention, and because it is well-intentioned, and provided by society's appointed experts, it can be even more damaging, subtle and pervasive.

Abolishing the label ‘schizophrenia' is an important step towards reversing the enormous travesty of natural justice which has existed in this area for decades. Not having a label, a ‘box' to put people into, will facilitate the development of more humane, healing, collaborative working relationships between all concerned, including the experiencer and those who care, love, and work with them. ==

A Carer's View of Schizophrenia

Some people like the term ‘schizophrenia'. The diagnosis does enable some service users to access benefits they might otherwise not, so they may find it useful. Some psychiatrists like to have a simple label they can use to describe people who otherwise have a confusing and diverse range of inconsistent symptoms; it suggests that they recognise these behaviours. In so doing, it enables them to ignore and discount the history and traumas of the service user, and all aspects of his or her life since everything is dismissed as ‘psychosis' and ‘fantasy'. Some families think initially but mistakenly that if there's a ‘diagnosis', it represents a well-defined situation for which a genuine treatment and route to recovery is known, as happens with other health problems. So, initially, there may be brief relief with the diagnosis. However, this does not last. All affected families are horrified when the label ‘schizophrenia' is soon attended by another damning label, that of ‘severe and enduring mental health problem', yet despite this devastating prospect, they are urged NOT to give up hope as this is important to their relative's recovery.

In practice, most families continue to hold the hope of recovery, and to work unstintingly for their family member's support with absolute dedication sometimes for decades and often despite the unsupportive disinterest, and sometimes outright hostility and inhumanity, of many staff. The family often hold the flame which helps and inspires the service user throughout his illness. This is called LOVE, and it is discounted and dismissed by the services and the NHS obsessed as it is with regulations and procedures.

The government has ‘recovery' as its goal though how to reconcile ‘recovery' with the ‘severe and enduring' label is a contradiction neither explored nor explained, and the treatment offered continues to be the same drugs.

As carers begin to search for information, they meet other carers and families; they come to know service users also diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia' who have been maintained on drugs for decades and whose lives, along with those of their families, are slipping by in poor or no quality, stigmatised, rejected, isolated and dumped by mainstream society.

Soon, the vast range of symptoms and histories included in the umbrella diagnosis ‘schizophrenia' is apparent and it is inconceivable to everyone except the psychiatrist that all these people could, or should, have the same diagnosis or the same treatment. By relying almost entirely on drugs, other therapies of proven value are ignored, often not even mentioned. When carers / families want to discuss other options with the psychiatrist, their request is usually refused or ignored. So, if you're in the right place with more forward thinking and humane approaches available, your service user family member can access empathic therapies, taking into consideration his/her specific history and experiences with understanding and allowing him/her to process them then move on with improved chance of recovery. But, if you are not in an enlightened area, you are supposed to accept the total devastation of your family meekly and without question.

‘Schizophrenia' was coined nearly a century ago. No other branch of medicine continues to rely on the faltering first footsteps taken so long ago. It is time it was abandoned so that service users can be treated individually, have their symptoms and histories properly addressed so they can recover proper control of their lives. Once schizophrenia has been abandoned as a concept, the medicalisation of mental illness and the domination of the drug companies is no longer acceptable. This is not recovery; it is sedation and containment using a chemical cosh lobotomy. Service users need appropriate individualised support, so that the 80% recovery rates achieved in the developing World can be seen here instead of the 20% we have currently. A recent comment by an enlightened psychiatrist was to the effect that the service user was in charge of his own recovery, but the psychiatrist supported his/her journey properly so that it was ordered and (s)he was not overwhelmed in the process.

Best wishes
Judith Varley ==

Mary Boyle
University of East London

The claim that there exists a biologically based diagnosable disorder called schizophrenia has been the focus of intense and persistent criticism and been shown to be scientifically bankrupt. But the label is also morally problematic. It is imposed on people in the absence of any evidence base and used without their informed consent (informed that is, of the controversies surrounding it). The label also appears to justify drugs as the major intervention as well as a vast and very unsuccessful research programme searching for biological and genetic causes.

But schizophrenia is much more than a label. Behind it lies the medical model – the claim that emotional distress and problem behaviour are pathological symptoms of illness or disorder rather than meaningful responses to serious problems and adversity in people's lives and relationships. The public know (often from their own experience) that people become distressed because of what is happening in their lives. This understanding, however, may be stretched in the case of the bizarre seeming experiences and behaviour which are labelled as schizophrenia and which, we are told, are outside the range of our understanding of ‘ordinary', everyday behaviour and experiences, hence the invoking of a brain disease to account for them. Yet instead of leading us to the conclusion that ‘mental illness is an illness like any other', the evidence points in a quite different direction – that schizophrenic behaviours and experiences are ‘behaviours and experiences like any other' – understandable in the same terms as we understand ‘ordinary' behaviour and meaningful in the context of peoples lives. If we acknowledge this, then we enter a world of ideas and possibilities entirely different from and far more constructive in terms of helping people, than those created through claims about schizophrenia as a brain disease.

Claims about illness and brain disease have been so persistent and plausible not just because psychotic behaviour and experience may indeed be difficult to understand but also because schizophrenia research is so often presented in ways which systematically obscure evidence against it (see www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Boyle.htm for many examples of this). Not only that, but service users, the public and professionals are rarely presented with alternatives so that ‘schizophrenia as brain disorder' seems all the more plausible simply because there appears to be no other way of thinking.

It is exactly because schizophrenia is not just a descriptive label but an entire way of thinking about people that we need to be alert to the danger that it will be replaced with an equally problematic label leaving intact the language and assumptions of symptoms and illness on which it is based. Indeed the label ‘dopamine disregulation disorder' (which does exactly this) has already been suggested, focussing, again, on what is supposedly going on in people's brains rather than their lives and implying that drugs are still the preferred intervention. What is being called for instead (and is already available) is not simply a different label but entirely different ways of thinking about those psychological experiences and behaviours which have been mislabelled and misunderstood as symptoms of schizophrenia. ==

Lucy Johnstone
Academic Director

Bristol Clinical Psychology Doctorate
Author 'Users and abusers of psychiatry', Routedge 2000.

We have known for a long time that the term 'schizophrenia' is scientifically meaningless. It is not actually a 'diagnosis' in a medical sense, since it is not based on bodily symptoms or signs. Instead, the criteria consist of a ragbag of social judgements about people's thoughts, feelings and behaviour - experiences which actually make sense in the context of people's histories of abuse and deprivation. The people who are so labelled may well have difficulties and be in urgent need of help, but this is not the way to help them.

We used to be convinced that disturbed or disturbing behaviour could be explained by the presence of 'evil spirits'. No one could actually see them, but we knew they were there. We are equally convinced today by the explanation that distressed people are, in effect, possessed by 'schizophrenia'. No one can detect the 'biochemical imbalance' or the 'genetic vulnerability' that is meant to underlie it, but we know the 'illness' is lurking in there somewhere. We know that the reason people suffer 'delusions' is because they have 'schizophrenia'. And how do we know they have 'schizophrenia'? Because they have 'delusions', of course!

Strip away the pseudo-scientific rhetoric and it is obvious where the real delusion lies. Believing in this 'illness' has powerful benefits for professionals and drug companies, and indeed for society at large, which has found it very convenient to conceal the effects of widespread damage and abuse under this ever-flexible label. Perhaps this is why we have failed to draw the moral from the pile of research indicating that this kind of breakdown has a far better outcome in non-industrialised countries that have not come under the influence of Western psychiatry.The people who lose out, of course, are the 'patients' or service users, for whom the diagnosis is often an introduction into a lifetime of dependence on psychiatric services and toxic drugs, alienated from mainstream society by fear and stigma. They would do far better in a village in rural India or Africa . Perhaps this also explains why we have failed to follow more enlightened examples from our own history - moral management, therapeutic communities and so on - or from places like Scandinavia which are moving well away from diagnosis and medication as first-line interventions.

'Diagnosing' someone with 'schizophrenia' is one of the most damaging things one human being can do to another. Re-defining someone's reality for them is the most insidious and the most devastating form of power we can use. It may be done with the best of intentions, but it is wrong. We now have a chance to put some of this right, by abolishing the label - not to replace it with another fake-medical term, but instead to work with individuals towards a true understanding of how and why they come to experience extreme forms of emotional distress.


http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Boyle.htm

It's all done with smoke and mirrors. Or, how to create the illusion of a schizophrenic brain disease

by Mary Boyle, University of East London

Reprinted from Clinical Psychology Issue 12. April 2002 pp 9-16

One of the more intriguing aspects of the "schizophrenia" literature is the discrepancy between the strength of the belief that "schizophrenia is a brain disease" and the availability of direct supporting evidence; even those who hold the belief admit that there is no direct evidence for it (e.g. Chua and McKenna, 1995; McGrath and Emerson, 1999; American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

This raises the question of why the belief seems so reasonable and credible. Or, to put it another way, how is the presentation of "schizophrenia as a brain disease" managed in such a way that the absence of direct evidence will not be noticed or not seem important? These questions are important not least because the belief has profound implications for research and intervention. For example, the US National Institute for Mental Health's "next steps for schizophrenia research" focused - in this order- on genetics, neuroimaging, post-mortem studies, developmental neurobiology and clinical trials (Hyman, 2000). In line with this biological emphasis, drugs may be seen as the "natural" and inevitable treatment, with non-physical interventions being seen - to use Tarrier et al.'s ( 2000) own description of their CBT - as "adjunct" therapies. ("Adjunct" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a subordinate or incidental thing".)

In this paper, I shall discuss some of the main ways in which the credibility and reasonableness of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease is created and maintained; before I do that, however, it is important to note that this belief obviously implies a prior belief in "schizophrenia" and, since "schizophrenia" is consistently presented as a diagnosable illness which causes bizarre behaviour and mental experiences, the scene is set for acceptance of the idea of schizophrenia as brain disorder, albeit one whose precise nature is unknown. This in itself is perhaps a powerful enough mechanism to account for the credibility of the belief, but there are other mechanisms which are worth discussing, for at least two reasons.


First, those who want to disseminate alternative models of psychotic behaviour and experience may be dispirited by the sheer persistence of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disorder and want to reflect on some possible reasons for this persistence; second, those who are open to alternative models may still find themselves pulled between these and the apparent credibility of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease. One further point should be emphasised. I'm not suggesting that any of the mechanisms I'll discuss are planned or even consciously used. On the contrary, at least some of them might seem simply like "doing science". I would argue, however, that it is difficult to over-estimate the threat presented by criticisms of the biological basis of schizophrenia and of the idea of schizophrenia itself, and that it would be naive not to expect defensive and anxiety-reducing measures to be (consciously or unconsciously) taken.


Creating the Impression of a brain disorder...
...by assertion

One of the most popular and direct ways of making "schizophrenia" seem like a brain disease is simply to assert that it is, leaving us in the awkward position of questioning the judgement of apparent experts. The assertions may be made almost in passing (e.g. "with a brain disease like schizophrenia. .." - McGrath, 2000) or more directly (e.g. "The recognition that schizophrenia is an organic brain disease. .." - Iverson 1997). Alternatively, and more subtly, it may be agreed that there is no direct evidence but with the clear implication that such evidence is bound to appear. What is notable about many of these assertions is the failure to mention any of the detailed and extensive criticisms which have been made of genetic and biological research on "schizophrenia" (see, e.g. Lidz et al., 1981; Lidz and Blatt, 1983; Rose et al., 1984; Bentall, 1990a; Chua and McKenna, 1995; Ross and Pam, 1995; Boyle, 1990; 2002; Sieben, 1999.)

It is difficult to overstate the importance of uncritical assertion in presenting "schizophrenia" as a brain disorder: the claims are often made in secondary sources where readers cannot directly evaluate the data on which the claims rely; and, by failing to mention criticisms, those who make the assertions create an impression of a truth which has never been challenged and is beyond challenge. This silence ; about criticism also deprives readers of information about sources which might offer a different view.

Interestingly, when criticisms or references to lack of evidence are made in traditional sources, they are much more likely to be about biological than genetic research. The most plausible reason for this is that the claims that "schizophrenia" is a genetic disorder can almost indefinitely justify the search for direct biological evidence and make its absence seem relatively unimportant. Criticism of genetic research, in conjunction with the lack of direct biological evidence, therefore presents a much more serious threat to the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease than does criticism of only biological research. In fact the latter, provided it is accompanied by optimism about the future, might actually help to maintain an aura of scientific respectability without compromising the assertion that schizophrenia is a brain disease.


...by creating apparently meaningful associations

In order to support the assertion that schizophrenia is a brain disorder, researchers must provide evidence that a diagnosis of schizophrenia is reliably associated with particular biological events or processes and that these have a direct causal relationship to the behaviours and experiences which are called schizophrenia. In the face of the lack of such evidence, the impression of a causal association between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological processes is created and maintained in four main ways.

The first involves the generation of large amounts of data on possible associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and many different biological variables. Indeed, Bentall (1990b) has remarked that virtually every known brain region or brain chemical has, at one time or another, been claimed to be linked to "schizophrenia". Not only that, but every technological advance in the study of the brain is quickly recruited for the study of "schizophrenics", although it is notable that this research is largely atheoretical (Ross and Pam, 1995). The resulting trawl for associations unguided by theory is greatly facilitated by computer and other technology, which allows measurement of possible associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and large numbers of biochemicals, brain regions, brain functions and, now, chromosomes, in far less time than it would take to develop a constructive theory of why any particular association might be expected or meaningful. Instead, a spurious impression of meaningful associations may be created by the preferential publication of positive results as well as by the inevitable finding of chance associations.

But it is uncomfortable to rely on the mere existence of correlations between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological variables, important though they are in creating an impression of a biological disorder, because critics can quickly point out that the association may not be specific to "schizophrenia" or attributable to other factors. An important way of obscuring this problem or, at least, of avoiding providing data which would highlight it, is through the use of "normal" control groups. The choice of comparison group is obviously important in any research study because of its role in controlling for potentially confounding variables. In the case of "schizophrenia" it is particularly crucial because those given the diagnosis are "deviant" in many ways apart from their "schizophrenic" behaviour. There is, for example, a strong association between diagnoses of schizophrenia and substance abuse (Kosten and Ziedonis, 1997) and between substance abuse and traumatic brain injury (McGuire and Priestley, 2002). Not only that, but following their diagnosis people routinely receive drugs with profound biological and psychological effects (Day and Bentall, 1996). Those diagnosed as schizophrenic may also have had earlier physical interventions for complaints of anxiety and depression, common precursors to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Andreasen et al.'s (1982) study of ventricular enlargement, for example, reported that 29 per cent of their "relatively young" sample of "schizophrenics" had received ECT. Lader et al. (1984) and Breggin (1990) have also reported a relationship between structural brain abnormalities and the use of minor tranquillizers. It is not surprising that the use of "normal" comparison groups in "schizophrenia" research has been strongly criticised for decades, yet it remains a common practice; more appropriate comparison groups would include those without a diagnosis of schizophrenia but with a history of legal and illegal drug misuse, those who are very socially isolated, those with a diagnosis of severe depression or anxiety, the long-term unemployed, those who had obstetric complications and those with a history of ECT or minor tranquillizer use.

An impression of meaningful association between "schizophrenia" and biological variables is created, third, (and most often in secondary sources) by failing to specify the degree of overlap between "schizophrenic" and comparison groups and by misleadingly presenting group differences in a particular factor, say ventricle-brain ratio or dopamine levels, as if the attribute in question applied to every person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and not to anyone else (for example, by claiming that "schizophrenics have enlarged ventricles"). The data themselves, however, show a very different picture. Lewis (1990), for example, reviewed 20 studies which compared lateral ventricle-brain ratios in people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and "normal" controls and found only eight showing significant differences. Similarly, Andreasen et al. (1990) found that only six per cent of participants with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had ventricle-brain ratios more than two standard deviations outside the "normal" control group mean, and this figure might have been reduced still further had more appropriate comparison groups been used, particularly given the relationship between structural brain abnormalities and the use of major and minor tranquillisers. Similarly, the relationship between schizophrenia diagnoses and obstetric complications - one of the factors used to present "schizophrenia" as a "neuro-developmental disorder" - is not only relatively weak, and even weaker for females than males (Hultman et al., 1999), but there is little consistency in the type of complication suggested as associated with "schizophrenia" or evidence that any association is specific to "schizophrenia".

Finally, if schizophrenia is to appear to be a biological disorder, then researchers need to demonstrate not only a reliable association between schizophrenia diagnoses and some biological factors, but also to demonstrate that these factors are direct causal antecedents of "schizophrenia". (I am using "causal" here in the sense suggested by Joffe (1996): that in the presence of a particular factor the probability of a certain outcome is increased and we have no reason to believe that both are dependent on a third variable.) This point is crucial. For example, there is a relationship between congenital severe facial disfigurement and social anxiety, but we do not consider social anxiety to be a biological disorder linked to neurodevelopmental processes, because we are aware of the complex and indirect relationships between social anxiety and the organic phenomenon of disfigurement.

There is, however, no evidence of a causal relationship between schizophrenia diagnoses and any genetic or biological event or process. Instead, the weak, variable and difficult to interpret associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological variables are subtly and not so subtly transformed to apparently causal relationships through language rather than evidence. For example, associations have been presented as progress in understanding the underlying neurobiology of schizophrenia, as support for neurodevelopmental theories of aetiology of schizophrenia, as part of our knowledge of the biological basis of schizophrenia, as reflecting causes active early in life and as part of the "strong case" for placing the beginnings of pathogenesis in the pre- or peri-natal period (Woods, 1998; Hultman et al., 1999; Jones and Tatrant, 2000; Tsuang et al., 2000; Lobato et al., 2001).

Taken together, these mechanisms create the misleading impression of an evidence base which is constantly being "built up" by the findings of new research, which is far stronger than it actually is and whose interpretation is entirely straightforward.

...by managing non-biological associations

Falloon (2000) has remarked that "paradoxically, the evidence for specific pathophysiological factors in major mental disorders is rather weak, whereas the research findings on stress factors such as family stress and life events, are extremely robust" (p.188). Of course, there is a paradox here only if we believe in schizophrenia as a brain disorder; otherwise, the paradox lies only in the large imbalance in attention paid to the two kinds of factors. Nevertheless, Falloon's remark suggests that if "schizophrenia" is to be convincingly presented as a biological disorder, then the "robust" research findings on its association with non-biological factors must somehow be managed in such a way as to maintain the primacy of biology. I'll briefly consider four ways in which this is achieved.

The first is by presenting the association between schizophrenia diagnoses and social factors as consequential rather than antecedent or causal. For example, it is well established that schizophrenia diagnoses are associated with the lowest social classes and most disempowered social groups (Gomme, 1996) Aro (1995), for example, found that the risk of psychiatric hospitalization was usually two to four times higher for the lowest than the highest educated social groups, but that this socio-economic gradient was steepest of all for schizophrenia diagnoses. This well-replicated association, however, has consistently been presented as part of a "downward drift" in which "having schizophrenia" causes people to perform less well in education and employment.


The argument, of course, is reasonable: it is difficult to achieve if you are tormented by voices or cannot be bothered to get up in the morning. But the causal argument is also reasonable and has empirical support which is not often mentioned in the literature (Link et al., 1986, Muntaner et al., 1991). Instead, what is notable is the speed and persistence with which the consequential argument was and is advanced, in marked contrast to the tendency of uncritically presenting "association as cause" in the case of biological research. Similarly, there is a well-established association between being readmitted to hospital (relapse) following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and certain very negative patterns of family interaction, known as high expressed emotion and characterised by overinvolvement and intrusiveness, and negative, hostile and critical comments (Leff and Vaughn, 1981). Following complaints from relatives that they were being blamed for their relative's "schizophrenia", researchers quickly offered reassurance that "high expressed emotion" did not cause "schizophrenia" but only influenced its course. It was also argued that the patients' "schizophrenic" behaviour had elicited these negative behaviours from relatives (Kavanagh, 1992).

There , fact, no clear evidence that such behaviour had suddenly appeared in response to a relative's "schizophrenia", although the argument is not implausible (see Patterson et al., 2000); there was, however, evidence from longitudinal studies (Doane et al., 1981; Goldstein, 1987) that patterns of negative interaction very similar to "high expressed emotion" had long preceded a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Again, what is striking is the speed and enthusiasm with which the non-causal and consequential arguments were adopted, in spite of the lack of evidence which favoured them over a causal argument.

These, however, are just two examples of a phenomenon - consequential thinking about social factors - which is so pervasive in the "schizophrenia" literature that it becomes difficult to think in any other way. Virtually all negative aspects of the lives of those diagnosed as schizophrenic, such as substance abuse, unemployment, social isolation, poverty and disrupted relationships, are routinely presented as consequences of "having a serious mental disorder". Of course the assumption is plausible and partly valid - hence its credibility. But it discourages us from asking in any systematic way whether some of these factors could have caused the "mental disorder" or whether, for example, substance abuse and psychosis might not both be ways of reacting to or trying to deal with very aversive life circumstances.

A second way of managing associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and social factors is through the idea of vulnerability; indeed the vulnerability-stress model of "schizophrenia" is now so popular as to have assumed the status of truth. McGlashan and Johannessen (1996), for example, claimed that "biological vulnerability is necessary for the development of psychosis but it is seldom sufficient in itself' ( p.204).

The vulnerability-stress hypothesis - widely interpreted as implying biological or genetic vulnerability - has proved to be an extraordinarily useful and effective mechanism for managing the potential threat to biological models of "schizophrenia" presented by the association between the diagnosis and non-biological factors. The usefulness of the hypothesis lies partly in its lack of specificity - since the nature of the claimed vulnerability has never been discovered, anything can count as an instance of it. Its usefulness also lies in its seeming reasonableness (who could deny that biological and psychological or social factors interact?) and its inclusiveness (it encompasses both the biological and social - surely better than focusing on only one?) while at the same time it firmly maintains the primacy of biology, not least through word order, and potentially de-emphasizes the environment by making it look as if the "stress" part of the vulnerability-stress model consists of ordinary stresses which most of us would cope with, but which overwhelm only "vulnerable" people. We are thus excused from examining too closely either the events themselves or their meaning to the "vulnerable" person.

The association of schizophrenia diagnoses with non-biological factors is managed, thirdly, by what might be called a double standard of presentation, whereby more critical comments are made about and more evidence demanded for, social than biological theories. Warner (2000), for example, under the heading "Poor parenting does not cause schizophrenia" claimed that "there is no evidence, even after decades of research, that family or parenting problems cause schizophrenia" and that "such theories have seldom been adequately tested" (p.9, 10). By contrast, his discussion of biological research, under the heading of "The brain in schizophrenia" was entirely uncritical and ended with the conclusion (echoing the vulnerability-stress model) that "These findings suggest that in schizophrenia there is a deficit in the regulation of brain activity by interneurones so the brain over-reacts to the many signals in the
environment" (p.l0) .

A final way of de-emphasizing the links between schizophrenia diagnoses and environmental factors is simply to convert the environment to biology. McGorry (2000) has provided a striking example of this process in his argument that "[low] vitamin D also provides a possible explanation for the increased risk of schizophrenia in second generation dark-skinned migrants who have moved to live in cooler climates (their skin is less efficient at producing vitamin D)" (61; parenthesis in original). There is no mention here that these "cooler climates" are peopled with light-skinned people with a long history of subjugating those with darker skins and that "dark-skinned migrants" are often exposed, from birth in the case of the second generation, to high levels of racism and social disadvantage.

This, however, is only one example of a much more general phenomenon. Littlewood and Lipsedge's (1982; 1997) analysis of ethnicity and psychosis provided an important lead in developing alternatives to biological accounts of "schizophrenia"; they acknowledge, however, that little of substance has been achieved (Littlewood and Lipsedge, 1997). One reason for this is that "race" has simply been converted back to a biological variable. A search of recent literature on "race", ethnicity and "schizophrenia" produced very few studies in which "race" was analysed as a social construct which mediates psychological experience. Instead, much of the research focused on biology and genetics (e.g. "race" differences in neuroleptic response; genetic linkage in southern African families). And the trend is likely to continue if the research direction favoured by Lewine and Coudle (1999) is followed. They argued that "despite [National Institute of Mental Health] efforts to facilitate the study of women and minorities in schizophrenia research, there is a significant lack of information about race differences in brain morphology and neuropsychologi4ral functioning in schizophrenia".

...by privileging biology

All of the factors discussed so far can be seen as ways of privileging biology in relation to "schizophrenia", but two further ways of achieving this are worth mentioning. The first is through the manipulation of lists: wherever there is a list, for example of "risk factors" or research directions, then biology will almost always predominate, whether numerically or in word order. For example, in McGlashan and Johannessen's (1996) list of around 55 supposed "vulnerability markers" for schizophrenia, only three could be said to be definitely social or interpersonal. And, as I noted earlier, the NIMH "next steps in schizophrenia research" focused on genetics, neuroimaging, post-mortem studies, developmental neurobiology and clinical trials.

A second way of privileging biology is through the frequent use of medical (and only medical) analogies. For example, "schizophrenia" has often been compared to diabetes, as "a syndrome whose causes are un-known" while discussion of the prevention of "schizophrenia" frequently includes comparisons with the prevention of infectious diseases or lung cancer. The importance of these medical analogies lies not only in their power to reinforce the idea of "schizophrenia" as a companion biological disorder, but in their borrowing of the credibility and success of medicine to create an impression of hope and optimism which would be very difficult to achieve simply through the biological literature on "schizophrenia" itself.

How can these mechanisms be challenged or at least balanced? Two obvious ways are, first, to question biological research much more closely (e.g. What were the control groups? How much did their results overlap with the "schizophrenic" group? What other factors might account for the results?) and, second to produce lists in which social and interpersonal factors predominate or are mentioned first. But we can also take every opportunity to insert causal thinking into discussions of social factors, to point out that behaviour and experience can cause biology as well as the other way round (Harrop et al., 1996) and to highlight the many different ways in which associations between brain and behaviour might be interpreted. For example, obstetric complications may be (weakly) associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia not because of their effects on people's brains but because of their effects on their lives, through their links with social disadvantage, educational difficulties, possible bullying and social rejection, lower employment prospects and so on. In other words, we need to foster accounts of psychosis which do not privilege biology but which do greater justice to the research data and to the reality of people's lives.

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